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For a while I have been gathering articles and texts I have been planning to read and disect to understand the changes in our religious landscape, mostly wondering about the declining role of the church.

On a regular basis I am confronted with this reality. There are many empty pews on Sundays, not only in Europe but in America. There is also a declining interest in theological education in formal seminaries. So as the church decline continues there is even a more rapid decline in people willing to serve, which might accelarate the church decline.

There are writing about this issue from various perspectives and some of them are listed here below.

Some people try to find an obvious reason that makes all the difference. One of those is to blame some aspect of the multifaceted tasks that pastors have. One aspect that is fun to blame is pastoral care. Carey Nieuwhof writes an article, How Pastoral Care Stunts the Growth of Most Churches. In it, Carey Nieuwhof points to reports by Barna Group that is interesting and helpful.

The Barna group reports the average Protestant church size in America as 89 adults. Sixty percent of Protestant churches have less than 100 adults in attendance. Only 2 percent have over 1,000 adults attending.

He then adds that when churches grow to more than 200, the pastoral care demands become unbearable and unsustainable, leading to a failure.

A Country and a Church for Women by JK Montgomery is about women in ministry in Iceland and talks about The Women’s Church, non-parish based community in an otherwise parish based church model in Iceland.

Hans Rottberger was born and raised as a Jew in Berlin, Germany. In 1935 he traveled with his wife Olga and the two year old Eva on the passenger ship Godafoss to Reykjavik. They were fleeing what they considered a volatile situation in their home town. Mr. Rottberger and his family got a temporary visa in Iceland, he learned the language, and built a company with a local resident. The family grew, a son was born in 1937. Continue reading And the Home of the Scared

I heard a bird yesterday in the attic. Let me be clear I love birds. I even have a bird feeder outside my living room window. I really care for birds. However, I don’t like them when they enter my attic. My anxiety started to set in. I imagined the bird plotting against me. Planning to leave marks all over my furniture. Continue reading The Bird and The Donald

Little over a month ago I was asked to write a short overview of the National Church in Iceland and the theological landscape in “a historical light”. Well, this is it.

The National Church in Iceland, or The Evangelical Lutheran Church in Iceland, was a State Church until (at least) 1997. Today it can be argued that it still shows strong signs of a state run religious entity. Salaries for priests are paid by the government as a part of an agreement between the church and state, which involves a complicated land swap deal from 1907. According to a recent supreme court ruling in Iceland, priest are considered government workers with all rights and obligations of such employees. Continue reading The National Church in Iceland

Originally written in 2007 as a paper in a course in Bioethics. Revised for clarity.

In this post I will look at distribution of health care. In western societies, the invisible hand of Adam Smith is usually considered the best way to distribute goods. In this post I will explain why that is not the case in distribution of health care and look at few issues that need to be considered when looking at health care distribution and prioritization in health care. Continue reading Distribution of Health Care

Almost eight years ago I attended a lecture (overview in Icelandic) at Pontificial College Josephinum, where Dr. R. Scott Appleby introduced the project Fundamentalism Observed, which he edited with Martin Marty.